This is from an email I recently sent an old friend:

Great getting together. Like I briefly said, I don’t often—in fact never—get a chance to chat about these hunches I’ve been gathering and coordinating over a long period of time. 

  I am currently rereading Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections and the below passage reminded me of my effort the other night to express the fact that when the Northern Germanic folk, namely the Norman French, starting around the twelfth century, were inspired to build their houses of worship, their cathedrals, as a sort of collective unconscious act they built forests of stone harking back to their pre-Christian forest dwelling heritage. 

  Jung of course is pure German, while our Germanic derivation is somewhat disguised or forgotten; Me being perhaps Anglo-Saxon and you being probably Anglo-Saxon on one side and perhaps Frank/Norman (Norseman- Viking) on the other. No matter, those deep instinctual connections and reverence for nature still reside in our hearts in spite of the ROMAN Catholic Church’s fifteen hundred year campaign to discredit and suppress nature’s majesty. Just look at Western Civilization’s (and the world’s) fascination with stories such as Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, both shot through with Northern themes and images. Also, for all we were taught about our Greco-Roman heritage in school, remember our days of the week, Tuesday (Tyr), Wednesday (Woden), Thursday (Thor), and Friday (Freya) all whisper of forgotten roots in Germanic myth. 

  But here’s the quote I underlined yesterday: Jung is recounting his difficult youth trying to distinguish and honour his deepest intuitions from the rote and hollow piety practiced by his parson father and the wider community. Reflecting back on his world as a ten year old around 1885 he writes: 

  “Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason the woods were the place where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe inspiring workings.

  This impression was reinforced when I became acquainted with Gothic Cathedrals. But there the infinity of the cosmos, the chaos of meaning and meaninglessness, of impersonal purpose and mechanical law, were wrapped in stone.”—C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. 

  Damn, that I’m even writing this seeming nonsense to you, that I identify and feel a comradeship with Jung and the other ‘Giants of the Human Spirit’ I’ve spoken of sets me quite a distance from the common run of present day humanity. Hence in large part the isolation I lived with for a great many years. Thankfully these days I can write that with a healthy dose of equilibrium and even bemusement, but it wasn’t always that way. 

  Anyway, enough for now.